Why everyone likes to read a negative review, but nobody likes to be reviewed negatively

Calum Marsh: Like any drug, censure has its benefits, its attractions, and its resounding pleasures. But it is also dangerous.

'There is perhaps something fundamental to human nature, some predisposition toward vicarious pain, that makes us take pleasure in merciless censure, in bearing witness to unapologetic vitriol.'Getty Images

When Chris Nuttall-Smith dined at the America restaurant on the 31st floor of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto a few months after it opened in 2014, a pair of unfriendly hostesses seated him at a table alone in the back of the room while he waited for the rest of his party to arrive – except it turned out they already had, and, unbeknownst to him, had been seated somewhere else entirely, an error that kept the diners apart for 45 minutes. When at last they found one another, they ordered: lobster Rockefeller, foie-gras flapjacks, bottle of Savennieres, rack of lamb. Servers ignored them, empty wine glasses languished and the appetizers, when they finally came, were followed by the mains at practically the same time.

For most diners, this would have been a rather trying dinner – a memorably dreadful way to squander something like $500 in the course of a single night. But Chris Nuttall-Smith was not an ordinary diner. He was, at the time, the chief restaurant critic at TheGlobe and Mail, and for a restaurant critic there could be no occasion more providential than an experience so shockingly bad. Nuttall-Smith went home and committed to paper a thousand mordant words. “There is servitude everywhere at America, but good service is remarkably hard to find,” he wrote. “It was as if nobody had ever worked in a real restaurant before.” Some of the food he liked, and he said that the chef, Bill Osborne, “will go far.” Indeed: “He’ll go far, far away from America, I hope.”

The review is hilarious, and devastating. And its repercussions were immediate as the piece went viral. On Twitter, its most brutal punchlines swiftly penetrated international borders, making the rounds among readers across the world who had doubtless never heard of Nuttall-Smith or the paper that published him, and within 24 hours on Facebook, the piece had been shared more than 15,000 times. America’s management, meanwhile, responded by overhauling its menu and firing its entire front-of-house staff. The ruthless critic destroyed a restaurant’s reputation – irreparably, it transpires. That zero-star review remained one of the top search results for “America restaurant Toronto” on Google from about the minute it was published until the day, last year, when the whole place unceremoniously closed.

With the exception, needless to say, of their unfortunate subjects, everybody loves a negative review. The pan is a popular art: caustic broadsides never fail to delight, and the more blistering the better. There is perhaps something fundamental to human nature, some predisposition toward vicarious pain, that makes us take pleasure in merciless censure, in bearing witness to unapologetic vitriol. We love to read trenchant critiques and scathing write-ups – to relish in the withering one-liners and eloquent clinching proofs. In fact it often seems as if the only criticism regularly read with much enthusiasm is the harsh tirade or the bitter polemic. When does one ever see a mixed notice spread like wildfire and lauded everywhere for its nuanced lukewarm perspective? No, it’s the harangue we tend to go in for, cold-blooded and unsparing. The right kind of malice can make an overnight sensation of a piece and launch the critic responsible well above and beyond their familiar audience.

We love to read trenchant critiques and scathing write-ups to relish in the withering one-liners and eloquent clinching proofs.

This is particularly true of restaurant critics such as Nuttall-Smith, who enjoyed a readership with his America review far broader than he was accustomed. Food criticism, unlike most other fields, is uniquely local: the object of the critic’s scrutiny operates in a specific city, and there isn’t much reason why a citizen of, say, Victoria or Moose Jaw would want to read about the quality of service at a brasserie in Montreal. But for a distinctly ferocious review any reader can be expected to make an exception. What is ordinarily foreign to us becomes of interest; what we will never taste ourselves is summoned before the imagination in all its unappetizing glory. The proper function of a restaurant review is to advise us where to eat. But a truly sparkling review gains a new dimension: it serves not only to advise, but, maybe more significantly, to entertain.

When Pete Wells, restaurant critic at the New York Times, descended upon Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square in the winter of 2012, and returned to his desk to pen an outrageously scornful open letter to owner and namesake Guy Fieri (in lieu of a straightforward review), he transcended New York, transcended his reputation and transcended even the circulation of the Times. “Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square?” Wells writes, worked into a paroxysm of sardonic fury. “Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?” Those, by the way, are some of the milder barbs. Even a harmless Baked Alaska Wells eviscerates as nothing less than “a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane.” Wells is, of course, an influential and prolific critic, and a fine writer. Not one word he has written before or since is quite as famous as these.

So widely shared and publicized was this review that Fieri himself was obliged to respond. “I thought it was ridiculous,” he insisted in an interview with the Today show. “I mean, I’ve read reviews and there’s good and there’s bad in the restaurant business. But that to me went so overboard, it really seemed like there was another agenda.” It was a fairly level-headed reaction, considering the source, and considering the contempt that exuded from the review. Not everyone can be counted on to endure the punishment of an unforgiving critic so sensibly. Responses, when artists deign to give them, range from a kind of superior defensiveness (a common approach is to denigrate criticism as a profession and ridicule the critic for never having produced anything themselves) to fuming cut-throat retaliation (whereupon the subject of a negative review proves he can dish it out as well as he can take it). Either way, it often seems, the response betrays a tactical error: it shows the person cares.

Music critics find themselves addressed this way routinely – whether because musicians are more sensitive to criticism or less afraid to talk about their feelings, no one can say. When Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen conferred upon L.A. indie rockers the Airborne Toxic Event’s self-titled debut album a rare 1.6 rating – about as low as one typically sees handed out to any record on the site, and as uncommon as a score above a 9 – the band swiftly issued a press release in which they countered the review at length. Cohen had called their transparent imitations of better artists “the musical equivalent of showing up to a bar with a bad fake ID and throwing a hissy-fit when you get carded.” The band responded by calling Cohen’s piece “bad journalism” that “reads less like a record review and more like a diatribe against a set of ill-considered and borderline preconceptions.” Which flourish of reproach stings more?

What is ordinarily foreign to us becomes of interest; what we will never taste ourselves is summed before the imagination in all its unappetizing glory.

Sometimes people overreact. Artists are tempermental, after all: there’s no telling how they’ll take an attack on the thing most precious to them, their work. Well do I remember my tenure at the music blog Cokemachineglow, when a colleague made the mistake of reviewing an album by the noise-rock band This Song is a Mess But So Am I. The critic, Sean Ford, described it as “childish.” Soon thereafter the band released a song called “Is This Childish Enough Sean Ford?” Sample lyrics: “Sean Ford, I’d like to smash your (obscenity) face in, you stupid (obscenity) / you worthless (obscenity) / Is this (obscenity) childish enough for you?” Ford’s review, incidentally, was perfectly respectful, if dissenting. But condemnations tend to strike the accused as inherently unreasonable, whether levelled under due process or with the utmost critical care.

Everyone likes to read a negative review. Nobody likes to be reviewed negatively.

When Patrick Goldstein wrote, in an off-handed aside for an awards-season roundup in the Los Angeles Times, that the dunderheaded farce Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo had been “sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic,” Rob Schneider – Deuce Bigalow himself – was duly offended. Indeed, he was moved to take out full-page ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter to retort – and just imagine the expense of that gesture. “Well, Mr. Goldstein,” Schneider wrote. “I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers.”

Which would have been amusing enough, albeit mildly psychotic. But this exchange then occasioned a further response from Goldstein’s colleague Roger Ebert – whose zero-star review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is among the finest things he ever wrote. He begins by handily discrediting Schneider’s insults: “I went online and found that Patrick Goldstein has won a National Headliner Award, a Los Angeles Press Club Award, a RockCritics.com award and the Publicists’ Guild award for lifetime achievement. Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks.” And then he delivers the fatal blow: “But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize … Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.”

Delightful, no? The pleasure gleaned from such barbs is intensely visceral – as exhilarating as violence, without the sour aftertaste of lasting consequence. When Norman Mailer marched up in a fit of rage to Gore Vidal at a party and, in reaction to a negative review he’d written, punched Vidal in the face, the assault didn’t hurt nearly as much as Vidal’s now-immortal riposte: “Once again, words failed him.”

It may be that castigation simply affords the critic more latitude than usual to exercise their wit and hone their language.

Ebert had other dust-ups. After he slammed The Brown Bunny out of Cannes, its director, Vincent Gallo, remarked that Ebert was “a fat pig with the physique of a slave trader.” Without missing a beat, Ebert returned the volley: “Someday I will be thin,” he wrote, “but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny.” In a war of intellects, you can feel the impact of the decisive strike.

It may be that castigation simply affords the critic more latitude than usual to exercise their wit and hone their language. It isn’t so much the negativity that readers are responding to with such amusement and enthusiasm as the words with which that negativity is rousingly articulated. I can quote from memory a volume’s worth of uproarious censure from a range of fields, for no better reason than the turns of phrase impressed themselves upon me indelibly.

Renata Adler on Pauline Kael’s When the Lights Go Down: “To my surprise and without Kael-like exaggeration simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.”

John Updike on a novel by Richard Hughes: “The author is so busy setting the stage that the actors can scarcely be heard above the noise of carpentry.”

Nabokov on Gorky: “There is not a single live word in it, not a single sentence that is not ready-made; it is all pink candy with just that amount of soot clinging to it to make it attractive.”

When people ask about my favourite works of criticism, I try to be more even-handed or perhaps reveal a cooler disposition – I pick some paean to the heights of artistic genius. In truth, the review I love most profoundly is Martin Amis’s siege on Hannibal and the diminished talents of Thomas Harris. “There’s really not much you can say to the miserable idiots who were ‘skewered’ to their seats by this harpoon of unqualified kitsch,” he writes. Is it worth dismantling a work of popular fiction so thoroughly? Yes, says Amis: “I found I could sit still while pundits talked about Harris’s ‘real moral impact,’ how ‘every line… is suffused with the sense of a titanic struggle with evil in its blackest form,’ despite the clear fact that the novel is helplessly voulu, sentimental and corrupt. But when I see Hannibal enlisted as literature…then my pen is obliged to flash from its scabbard.”

Like any drug, censure has its benefits, its attractions, and its resounding pleasures. But it is also dangerous.

In the introduction to his indispensable collection of criticism The War Against Cliché, in which this Hannibal review prominently figures, Amis observes that for the professional critic, “enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power.” Indeed. The appeal of negativity to the reader, that mysterious quality which makes the pan and the broadside irresistible, should alone warn the cautious critic of indulging in bouts of vitriol too freely, or too frequently. Harsh criticism has an intoxicating effect on writer and reader alike: both ought to be wary of its influence. Like any drug, censure has its benefits, its attractions and its resounding pleasures. But it is also dangerous.

As readers, we ought to seek out balanced criticism and find joy in praise as well as damnation. We should allow ourselves to be charmed by finding art exalted, not just demolished. It behooves the critic, meanwhile, to proceed with an open mind and a generous spirit – to approach each object under review not as an opportunity to flex the muscles of cleverness and earn the admiration of a charmed audience, but as an occasion to soberly take a work of art into consideration, to weigh its faults and merits and to judge it accordingly. The writer who actively looks forward to lambasting a book or film or album, who thrills at the chance to consult “horrible” in the thesaurus, does more than fail their duty. They do their readers, and themselves, a disservice.

Let us return to the late Roger Ebert once more. In his lifetime, Ebert published an entire book-length collection of his most scathing reviews, hearty take-downs of such resoundingly trounced pictures as Armageddon and Battlefield Earth. The title of the anthology, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, is derived from one particularly hostile missive: a review of Rob Reiner’s North, starring Elijah Wood and Bruce Willis. “I hated this movie,” Ebert writes. “Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”

One feels there’s something different about this tirade, something deficient. Could it be the sense of imprecision? The quality of indiscriminate scorn? One does not doubt the sentiment, exactly — Ebert surely really did loathe North. But nothing about the paragraph above feels specific to Rob Reiner’s failures. “Hated hated hated hated hated this movie” could apply equally well to any bad film: it might have been devised in advance to use when needed, rather than made from scratch to order. The Deuce Bigalow review hurts because it could only be about Deuce Bigalow; the film was destined to be attacked in those words, and the review resonates with the truth of that destiny.

This, I think, is the real secret of the great negative review. It’s not merely the wordplay or the animosity that matters, the turning of a witty phrase — it’s whether you can tell what’s being slammed truly deserved it, and whether the venom loosed by the writer feels truly earned.